At Vicksburg, Miss., on May 11, 1894, a small piece of alabaster fell in a hailstorm. On the same day, eight miles away in Bovina, a gopher turtle fell in a hailstorm. This was reported in Monthly Weather Review, May 1894; Nature, 1894-430; and Jour. Roy. Met. Soc., 20-273. The editor of the Review decided that “apparently some special local whirls or gusts carried heavy objects from this earth’s surface up to the cloud regions.” Fort objects that “of all the incredibilities that we have to choose from, I give first place to a notion of a whirlwind pouncing upon a region and scrupulously selecting a turtle and a piece of alabaster. … There is no record of the fall of other objects.”

–Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned, p. 89-90 (The Complete Books of Charles Fort, Dover, c1974).